Open-access edition of An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia by Nikolaos A. Chrissidis

FAIN: DR-290456-23

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14850-2820)
Mahinder Singh Kingra (Project Director: July 2022 to January 2025)

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia, the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, was established in 1685 by Greek monks trained in the Jesuitical tradition. When they created their school in Moscow, the founders emulated the structures, methods, and program of studies of their Jesuit prototypes. As Nikolaos A. Chrissidis shows in An Academy at the Court of the Tsars, this academy had a profound and lasting impact on Russian and Eastern Orthodox intellectual practices, Russian-Greek cultural relations, and contact between seventeenth-century Russia and Western Europe. By uncovering the origins of higher education in Tsarist Russia, this book details how the arrival of European pedagogy worked to eventually bring Russia into the modern intellectual mainstream.

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Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia
Year: 2016
ISBN: 9780875807294
Publisher: Nikolaos A. Chrissidis
Author: Cornell University Press
Abstract: The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy's impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.
Primary URL: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780875807294/an-academy-at-the-court-of-the-tsars/
Primary URL Description: Cornell University Press
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/88189
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
URL 3: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/oa_monograph/book/47393
URL 3 Description: Project Muse
Type: Single author monograph

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